Archives West Finding Aid

Charles Malmo (ca. 1862-1938) immigrated to the United States from Norway in 1878. He moved to Seattle in 1891, and established the Malmo Seed and Nursery Company in 1893. He opened his first small garden store at 916 Second Avenue, at that time a relatively undeveloped area in downtown Seattle. Malmo operated several greenhouses and a warehouse during the Alaska Gold Rush, selling nursery stock during the residential building boom.

Prior to 1920, almost all ornamental plants, seeds and bulbs were imported to the Northwest. Choice trees, shrubs and flowers arrived from Japan, England and Holland in large quantities, and many of these plant varieties thrived in the region’s similar climate. In 1912, The Plant Quarantine Act was passed by Congress to address concern over pest outbreaks in nursery stock in the United States. The subsequent embargo on foreign plant importation provided Malmo with an excellent business opportunity, and the company began to utilize their plant inventory for local propagation of nursery stock. Charles Malmo is credited with being the first in the Northwest to do so. Plant production quickly intensified and Malmo developed a landscaping business. Some of the mature yards surrounding historic Seattle homes were once the work of the Malmo Company.

The Malmo Nursery Company continued to thrive, and in 1923 began selling nursery stock from a large corner store on 6th Avenue and Stewart Street. In 1930, Malmo opened a multi-level “open air garden store” at Westlake in Seattle’s new Denny regrade area. The Garden Square store replaced glass windows with wrought iron grillwork on the street level and had an elaborate roof garden. To supply his retail and landscaping businesses, Malmo maintained 25 acres of greenhouses and fields in Georgetown, adjacent to Boeing Field. In 1937, Charles Malmo’s son Clark bought 30 acres at the present site of the University Village shopping mall, and later opened a suburban nursery.

In 1962, the Malmo family sold their business to Ernst Hardware and Pay‘n Save Stores and became a wholly owned subsidiary. By 1975, there were 22 Malmo Nurseries operating in Washington State. On July 12, 1996 Ernst Hardware filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and began its final going out of business sale in November 1996, closing 53 stores and selling off the remainder of its operations, including the nursery business.